DOJ Wants Tobacco Companies To Admit Their Deception

Tobacco companies should admit in product warnings that they deceived the public about the dangers of smoking and manipulated their products to increase addiction, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

The department, in the final phase of a long-running court case against leading tobacco companies, released a series of statements that it wants cigarette makers to publish about the dangers of their products.

"We manipulated cigarettes to make them more addictive," one proposed statement would say, while another offers this: "We control nicotine delivery to create and sustain smokers' addiction, because that's how we keep customers coming back."

In total, the department proposed three pages of statements that it wants the industry to publish. Many of the proposed statements essentially require the tobacco companies to say they deceived Congress and the public.

The proposal comes in the wake of a 2006 decision by U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington, who ruled that tobacco companies violated federal racketeering laws by engaging in a decades-long scheme to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking.

Among the penalties Kessler imposed, the judge required cigarette makers to issue corrective statements about the dangers of their products, to appear on television and in newspapers, product packaging and retail displays.

The Justice Department's submission Wednesday offered the language the agency wants included in those statements.

Lawyers for the tobacco companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The release of the proposed statements had been delayed because the government and the industry disagreed about when the information should be made public. Kessler ordered the information be released on Wednesday. The companies will have a chance to lodge legal objections to the government's proposal.

Another issue is the effect of intervening regulations by the Food and Drug Administration. In 2009, Congress gave the FDA wide authority to regulate the tobacco industry, including a requirement that companies place large, graphic health warnings on cigarette packs.

The FDA last November proposed draft warning labels that could include graphic images depicting dead bodies and diseased lungs. The agency's proposal is not yet final.

The Justice Department's long-running tobacco case dates back to 1999, when the Clinton administration alleged that nine tobacco companies and two related trade associations engaged in a 50-year conspiracy to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking. A nine-month trial took place in 2005.

Defendants in the case include Altria Group Inc.'s (MO) Philip Morris subsidiary; Reynolds American Inc.'s (RAI) R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.; British American Tobacco (Investments) Ltd., a subsidiary of British American Tobacco PLC (BTI); and Lorillard Tobacco Co., a unit of Lorillard Inc. (LO).

-By Brent Kendall, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-9222; brent.kendall@dowjones.com

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